Crafting mechanics & physics engine

Modes are the primitive alphabet: the Standard Model particle set, imported from real physics data. A mode carries immutable quantum numbers, a real lifetime, a real cosmic abundance, a symmetry classification, and a generation index. Modes are the only authored content in the entire matter system.

Patterns are compositions of modes — or of other patterns, because composition is recursive. A pattern is content-addressed by its component multiset plus its binding-pathway class. Patterns carry no authored stats whatsoever.

Instances are placed occurrences of a pattern in the world. They decay stochastically, and their live population is what the Census counts.

Stage 1 — hard conservation. Charge, colour neutrality, baryon and lepton number, energy budget. These are the only inviolable rules in the game, and they are the real ones. A proposal that fails stage 1 doesn't fizzle; it is simply not a sentence the universe parses.

Stage 2 — the coherence functional. Χ ≥ 0.62 and the verse cuts: a new pattern enters the Ledger and the census updates. Between 0.38 and 0.62 it resonates — it rings but will not hold, and a residue event is logged to the anomaly engine. Below that, clean failure with pathway-dependent loss.

That residue is what we understand gravity to be. A ringing verse sheds what it couldn't carry — the fraction of coherence that failed to keep up — and that shed settles into the world as mass. Gravity is not a force that pulls; it is the settling of what couldn't keep up. residue = (1 − efficiency) × intensity × gradient × dt. Every incoherent binding thickens the world.

Ramp — slow monotone sweep. Highest I-register, deepest written τₖ, slowest. Patience is a material property of the result.

Jump — discontinuous slam. Fast and cheap; the product cuts shallow. Jump-crafting makes ammunition; ramp-crafting makes heirlooms.

Ring — oscillatory approach. Hitting the resonance window multiplies I and can lift a composition over Χ_cut that no ramp could afford; missing it dumps residue.

Because the pathway is part of the pattern hash, performances are the tradeable knowledge object. The recipe alone underdetermines the object — the wiki-solves-everything failure mode is structurally impossible.

The world is permeated by the χ substrate carrying a scalar field η_bind ∈ [0,1]. High-η shorelines are matter-dense and forgiving, but their hosting slots are full. Low-η regions are open_space( ): ordinary cuts get harder, but each unit of refusal opens hosting capacity at a TMI bonus.

The frontier direction of the map is not far away — it is down the η gradient, into space that refuses harder and hosts more. Players prospect the halo with gravitational instruments: dark matter as terrain, surveying as reading the mass the light doesn't account for.

The ≈⅔ partition is a systemic constant: roughly 65% of a deep verse's budget must route into bound, localized form, ~35% stays fluid. No perfect extraction, ever — every gain writes something back into the world.

1. Prospect — read the halo, find open_space( ), claim hosting capacity.
2. Accumulate — gather overflow: high-τₖ material whose channel cannot carry its mass budget.
3. Compel — perform the crossing at the QCD shoreline; ramp, jump, or ring.
4. Host — land the product in your claimed slots; hosted verses accrue rehearsal and census share.
5. Recompose — the census shifts, TMIs drift, new tensions accumulate.

The engine maintains an expectation model for every process the current catalog can express. When observed rates sit persistently off prediction — same direction, across regions, across epochs — the residual is promoted to an Anomaly and begins accruing its own τₖ-mass. Age and cross-confirmation make an anomaly heavier, not staler. Because residue is gravity, the heaviest anomaly in the catalog is also the gravest heap of mass in the world — the Black Sun.

Resolution is compositional: somewhere in pattern-space is a missing mode that re-fits the observations. Breadth is depth — a candidate keying several tensions at once earns a symmetry-standing bonus of 0.85 that single-anomaly patches cannot reach. The engine structurally rewards unification over epicycles.

A biometal is not a metal biology consumes; it is a mineral τₖ-core and a living lineage agreeing to keep each other. Surplus exists only on the hosted pathway: TMI(core ⊕ cage, ramped) > TMI(core) + TMI(cage), while jump-binding a bare ion is the extractive limit with no surplus at all.

Heme iron, the [4Fe-4S] cubane, chlorophyll's magnesium, the Mn₄CaO₅ ratchet, FeMoco, cobalamin's Co–C bond, the zinc finger, biologically-sized magnetite — none of these are authored items. They are attractors the physics should rediscover. If players re-derive photosynthesis's water-splitting ratchet without the game ever containing an entry for it, pillar one is proven.

The abstract physics above needs a rendering engine that is itself coherent with it. The CDT (Coherence Data Type) substrate provides one: instead of discrete block states and lookup tables, every voxel coordinate holds a localized complex field — Ψ(x) = Σ Aₖ·e^{iθₖ}. Amplitude A is physical density and structural permanence; phase θ is material state (0 reads as solid crystal, π/2 as fluid, π as vapor/field energy); and τₖ is the binding coefficient — higher τₖ lowers decay and stabilizes the structure against entropic degradation. It is the same τₖ the TMI kernel writes on a ramp.

Terraforming never collides. When two players alter the same region there are no overwrite locks or merge counters: updates superpose by field addition, Ψ_final = Ψ_A + Ψ_B. Aligned phases (Δθ ≈ 0) reinforce — matter solidifies faster, shared building literally hardens. Opposed phases cancel mass into hollow cavities or vapor without destruction. Consensus geometry is what renders: the maximum spectral density of the field becomes the visible world, while alternative builds remain in superposition, reachable if the observer shifts local frequency.

Because chunks persist as phase-indexed field matrices rather than block IDs, multiple realities coexist on identical coordinates. A player tuned to θ = 0 walks a solid glass bridge across a volume where a player at π/2 swims an open aquifer. The world's deepest structures — residue heaps, anomaly sites, the Black Sun's deficit — are the same field read at phases ordinary observation never visits.

This also settles the economics in-engine. Value composes in real time as Yield = Δt × Quality × τₖ: presence and phase-locked building reward both player and world, not grinding. Creator commitment (baseline focus units stabilizing a dimension's ruleset) and attention-futures let players invest directly in the persistence of places — the census axis made spendable.